What I Saw at OpenAI's Developer Day, My Company Died—Learn From My Mistakes, and More!
Everything we published this week
Nov 12, 2023 · 5 min readUpdated Jan 17, 2026
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Hello and happy Sunday!
Many of you have told us that you’d enjoy listening to our stories, so we recorded audio versions of Dan’s and Evan’s articles. Let us know what you think of them in the comments.
- "What I Saw At OpenAI’s Dev Day"
- "A Day At the Center of the AI Boom"
- "We Should All Want to be Mitt Romney"
Now, on to everything we published this week.
Our stories
What I Saw at Open AI's Developer Day
Dan is onsite, hyped, jazzed, pumped, and ecstatic in a live report from San Francisco about the future of AI. Read this if you want an analysis of OpenAI’s new product announcements—who lives, who dies, and who wins.
My Company Died—Learn From My Mistakes
Everyone talks about the glory of entrepreneurship, but no one talks about the pain of what happens when you lose. Read this if you want an honest accounting of a founder sharing what she learned when her company fell apart.
We Should All Want to Be Mitt Romney
Maybe the key to happiness is being married, stupid rich, and Mormon? Read this for Evan’s review of a new book about Mitt Romney.
A Day at the Center of the AI Boom
Dan wrote AI analysis, and then he wrote AI feels. Read this to capture the vibe of how AI is making San Francisco anew.
No Margin, No Mission
Everyone is mission-driven until the money gets tight (including Buddhist monks). Read this if you want to better understand the connection between profits and purpose.
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Chain of links
You'll get better results from ChatGPT if you tell it you'll be fired if its response is wrong.
We bet you've always wondered, "What would ChatGPT be like if it was red-pilled and made dad jokes?" Luckily Elon launched GrokAI, so we could all find out.
What the iPhone did to hardware, AI will do to software. (Good take, but we would narrow AI to ChatGPT.)
Current-generation AI might not be able to generalize much past the data it was trained on. Eat your heart out, AI hypelords and Eliezer Yudkowsky.
FigJam AI launches to help you automatically track and sort visual information. It's cool.
Runway launches possibly the most amazing AI feature of the week: make any part of a still image move just by clicking on it. It's like the pictures from Harry Potter come to life. Check it out.
Want to see all the GPTs people are making? Use Google.
Not AI related, but oddly mesmerizing:
One year in AI
OpenAI released ChatGPT almost one year ago, on Nov. 30, 2022. Here’s a look back at some of our stories from then in light of what the company released last week:
Generative AI narrows the “taste gap”—the difference between what you hope to make and what your skills allow for.
The AI value chain consists of five links: compute, data, foundational model, fine tune, and the end user access point.
With AI pushing creation costs to zero and its economic value being subject to power law outcomes, here are six new theories of AI.
AI tools will empower writers, founders, and other individuals for whom intelligence was previously too expensive.
Researcher Linus Li uses AI to help him think better and get more done.
The napkin math
A European LLM raises $500M from the folks who own German supermarket chain Lidl, while a Chinese LLM raises at a billion-dollar valuation eight months into its existence. Investors are making simultaneous bets on OpenAI competitors winning on localization and specialization. There is a joke here about AI models with 12 months of parental leave versus an LLM run by commies, but we’re not crass enough to make it.
WeWork filed for bankruptcy, which caused predictable dunking on X, but it’s the right move for the company. It needs to exit its bad leases and negotiate everything else. Nothing like saying, “Our company is bankrupt, so give us a discount please.”
We are in the rent-seeking phase of Apple. The company continues to gain market share with iPhone sales up 2.8% to $43.8 billion despite overall sales in China down 2.5%. Meanwhile, services revenue and margin are at all-time highs. You can expect this to be the case for the next few years (barring some war with China-type event). The company is very much in a “wait until Vision Pro makes us trillionaires”-mode, and will continue to slowly juice margins and skew product mixes to more profitable lines.
That's it for this week.
Thanks to our Sponsor: Athena
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